# A sales team that runs on its CRM

Field notes / 03

A CRM is only as good as what the sales team puts into it, and people in field sales have better things to do than fill in forms. Visit reporting works when logging a visit takes less effort than skipping it, and when the people who report get something back.

## What I learned the hard way

1. **Start from the rep’s day, not from the report.** Go along on visits, or at least follow a week of them. The tool has to fit between the car park and the next appointment.
2. **A visit report takes two minutes or it does not happen.** A few fields, sensible defaults, and a screen that works on a phone with a poor signal. Everything else can be worked out later from the data.
3. **Give something back for every field you ask for.** If logging a visit shows the rep the customer’s open orders and last complaint, they will log it. If it only feeds a dashboard for management, they will not.
4. **Managers use the same data, on the same screen.** The day a manager asks for the numbers in a spreadsheet, the CRM is dead. Run the weekly meeting from the CRM itself.
5. **Connect visits to orders.** A visit that leads to an order should show up as one. That link, to the ERP or to the store, is what turns reporting into a picture of what works.
6. **Change management is the project.** The configuration takes weeks. The habit takes months. Train in small groups, find the two reps the others listen to, and fix their complaints first.

Diagram: What a rep gives and what the rep gets back. A visit logged in two minutes and the next step go in. The customer’s open orders, the last complaint and the rep’s own numbers come back. The weekly meeting runs on the same screen.

## Tips and tricks

- Pilot with one region before the whole team.
- Count the mandatory fields, then halve them.
- Try the mobile app in a basement and on a motorway.
- Publish one report that is useful to the reps themselves in the first month.
- Review adoption every week, person by person, without blame.
- Retire the old spreadsheet on a date that everybody knows.

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